Sofie & Cecilia

by Katherine Ashenburg

  JULY 1934

  JOHN LAVERY WROTE from London with the news that MacDonald Lawrie would soon be married, to an instructor of copper enamelling in the school.

  In the spring, a letter came from Mr. Lawrie himself. He was leading a study tour to Sweden in the summer, taking perhaps eight students through the Dalarna villages famous for their crafts, and to the Vogts’ old buildings and their collections of folk arts. He wondered if he might bring the students to Askebo? They would stay in the hotel in Falun, and it would mean so much to them to see her work. And, naturally, the famous house of Nils and Sofie Olsson.

  Siljevik, July 1934

  Dear Sofie,

  Mr. Lawrie and his students, all very keen and enthusiastic, left this morning for Rattvik and Leksand. I think they are planning to arrive in Askebo on Tuesday. Lisbeth laughed at the extent of my preparations, and of course the old buildings are nowhere near what we would like them to be yet, but I felt we had Sweden’s reputation to uphold. At any rate, it went off well enough, and we even had some last-minute fiddling in the Hall for them.

  I found Mr. Lawrie aging advantageously. Like so many men, and unlike us, crow’s feet and grey hairs become him. When he was younger, he seemed an almost painful mixture of orange and pink, someone whose colouring Lars would have loved to paint but not otherwise to be recommended. But now that grey is calming his hair and he has added a bit of ballast to his slender frame, he looks much less raw.

  And, I do not believe that he and the copper enamellist are engaged, or at least not yet. I asked him several questions about his plans, and heard nothing of a wedding.

  He told me you have promised him and his students a crayfish party. You are a saint to go to that trouble.

  Enjoy your time with them.

  We are in the last throes of preparations for the ground-breaking of the gallery, so I will write more once that is over.

  Your friend, in haste,

  Cecilia

  Mr. Lawrie and most of his students arrived in a cab from Falun. Two of the hardier ones had got up at dawn and walked the fifteen kilometres to the village. Sofie had wondered if she would feel uncomfortable when she saw him, but they shook hands like old friends. He introduced the students, six young women and two men. Although by now she followed the tangles and burrs of Mr. Lawrie’s accent easily, it seemed that each new Glaswegian took a while to understand. It was like scraping barnacles off a boat, she thought. Unlike the English, who often seemed blind to the letter r, these Scots pronounced it—but only sometimes.

  She took them to the church and showed them Nils’s saints and angels, which she still found strained and unconvincing. On the other hand, she loved the portraits he had made of the villagers, which were hung in the village hall—the sad-eyed minister; the farmer whose hands, folded in his lap, were as big as his head; the cross-eyed carpenter who had delivered the furniture she designed under cover of darkness all those years ago. Prepared by Mr. Lawrie, the visitors were also keen to see her textiles and furniture. The closest questioning—about the big-boned rocker, the box-style plant stand and the cradle with the railing made of fence posts—came from the young women.

  The crayfish party was a humid, tipsy success, made more wonderful for the guests because it was held under the birches at the little point that jutted into the river, the setting for Nils’s painting Preparing for the Feast. They knew the painting by heart, and when she appeared with the glasses and the aquavit decanter with its tall stopper, one of them, a brunette named Margaret, cried, “It’s the wee glasses and decanter from the picture!” By the time the mosquitoes came out, the aquavit and beer had done their work and they did not notice. The bibs, the obligatory juice-sucking before shelling and the messy shucking all loosened their inhibitions further. Sofie cast an eye over the mushroom pies, the salads, the Vasterbotten cheese. They would be ignored, as usual, until the crayfish were all eaten.

  She had asked Birger and Evert from next door to come and sing the traditional drinking songs. Birger brought his accordion and an unsuspected knack for teaching, and soon the Scottish guests were singing in Swedish.

  Helan går

  Sjung hopp faderallan lallan lej

  They sang lustily, with many swallows of aquavit in the appropriate places.

  When they asked what it meant, Evert translated freely,

  He who doesn’t drink the first

  Shall never, ever quench his thirst.

  Sofie had no idea her bashful young neighbour was such a ready versifier. She smiled at Mr. Lawrie over a heap of crayfish topped with a spray of dill, its yellow-green blossom exploding like a firecracker. He had taken off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up to the elbow. With his bib, he looked like a brawny baby. Flushed with aquavit and the knowledge that the party had gone off well, she considered what it would be like to touch his forearm.

  “It was as hot as this the first time you came here, do you remember?”

  “Yes, but there were no crayfish then. Boeuf bourguignon and boiled potatoes, if I remember rightly.”

  They both knew that he remembered perfectly.

  “Yes, it was a mistake. Nils liked to show off my French recipes.”

  He laughed. “That was a long time ago.”

  Some of the students were planning to walk to the mine next day, others to visit the churches in Falun or the old miners’ neighbourhoods. If anyone wanted to see Nils’s engraving shop in Falun, she had made arrangements for Mrs. Jansson next door to the Blindgatan house to let them in. Then they would spend a few days visiting the mine managers’ estates that had especially fine folk murals. Before he left, Mr. Lawrie asked if he could visit in the morning.

  After breakfast, in Nils’s beloved bathroom, Sofie tried to pinch some colour into her cheeks. When she raised her arms, the flesh under her upper arms rippled like chiffon. She thought about Glasgow, which she had never seen. She had known as soon as Mr. Lawrie stepped down from the cab yesterday that the rumours of the enamelling teacher were not true. She thought about the bed-life she had had with Nils. It still seemed odd to her that she rarely missed it. Having it had been utterly natural, and often happy, for thirty-five years, and now not having it seemed equally natural. Perhaps it was a habit she could acquire again.

  The house and garden looked particularly themselves that morning, with even the most attention-getting details absorbed into a harmonious whole. Anna brought the tray to the wooden table under the birch trees, overlooking the river.

  “Wasn’t there a flower bed here?” Mr. Lawrie asked.

  “Yes, quite a while ago.”

  This time, it was obvious he knew what he was going to do. There would be no overturned furniture, no declaration that had nowhere to go, no uncertainty about what to call her. He made no pretense of drinking his coffee.

  “Sofie.”

  She met his look.

  “I am calling you Sofie because I cannot propose marriage to someone called Mrs. Olsson. I still love you. I have for twenty-five years, and now I hope that you will become my wife.”

  Perhaps his only mistake was asking her while they were sitting. Had they been standing, it would have been easier to take her in his arms—gently, confidently—and perhaps that would have done the trick. Or perhaps not.

  They stayed sitting. She took his hand and held it.

  “MacDonald,” she said, “since you call me Sofie. Thank you. You are a very treasured friend. I need a little time. Could I think about it for a few days?”

  Of course she could. As he was leaving, Marianne and her younger children arrived. The family was coming for their own crayfish party, and Marianne was the first. Her husband and the others would arrive that evening. MacDonald shook hands with Marianne and the children, sent his regards to the rest of the family, and left.

  At lunch she said to Marianne, “I’m sorry, my love, you will be tired of mushroom pie. We are going to eat last night’s leftovers, and then we will have more, fresh, this evening. But Anna can’t
eat all this, and I hate to waste food.”

  Marianne helped herself to a piece of pie. She didn’t mind.

  “Mr. Lawrie looked rather the worse for wear,” she said, picking up her fork.

  Sofie thought about that while she tried to interest the grandchildren in cucumber salad.

  “Well, they all enjoyed the aquavit and beer, so maybe he was a little pale from that. I think he is looking quite distinguished.”

  Marianne made a face.

  “Distinguished? Mr. Lawrie? I remember when we were children, whenever we encountered that peculiar word, chilblains, in our English lessons, we would shout, ‘Mr. Lawrie!’ Not that we ever saw any chilblains on him, but we were sure if anyone had them, it would be Mr. Lawrie.”

  Don’t rise to this, Sofie told herself. But she couldn’t help herself. The words leaped out, perhaps so that she could test whether it had really happened.

  “He has asked me to marry him.”

  Marianne looked blank, then stunned. Then she laughed, the big cackle that comes when someone says something completely ridiculous.

  “What do you find so funny about that?”

  Marianne saw that she had miscalculated, but she was not about to back down.

  “You mean, what don’t I find funny about that. First of all, you aren’t going to marry anyone. You are going to stay here, in the house you and Pappa made…I don’t know quite how to say it, but maybe respecting his memory, keeping it going so that you can show it to people…so they can see how he wanted things, how you two wanted things…”

  Sofie noted silently that although Marianne and Birgitta had recently wanted her to move, now apparently she was destined to tend the flame of their father’s memory here in the house, forever.

  “And if you ever did want to remarry,” Marianne went on, “it certainly wouldn’t be to MacDonald Lawrie.”

  “And why not, exactly?”

  Marianne was treading a bit more carefully now.

  “Well, for one thing, he lives in Scotland. No, if you were to marry, it would be someone like Axel Tallberg, or perhaps Ernest Thiel.”

  Touching. The engraver and writer who had championed Nils’s work, and the banker who had collected it. What a loyal daughter to her father she was. What a darling, really. Sofie fought the impulse to stand, that would be unnecessarily dramatic.

  “As a matter of fact, I am going to write Mr. Lawrie this afternoon and accept his proposal.”

  Which meant that Marianne left her mushroom pie untouched, after all.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  JULY 1934

  THAT SAME MORNING in Siljevik, Lisbeth and Cecilia sat at breakfast. Dozens of their figures were reflected in the silver pieces on the plate racks and shelves. An old woman and one Cecilia still thought of as young, although she too had some grey in her hair.

  “Listen.”

  Cecilia shook the newspaper and folded it in half, as if to stress what was coming.

  “‘The Ministry of Health asks that ten Jewish doctors be allowed to emigrate from Germany. A majority of students at Uppsala condemn the idea.’”

  Lisbeth put a patient look on her face. They had travelled this way before, and she was going to point out the familiar landmarks once again.

  “Cecilia, the students at Uppsala are some of the oldest fogies in the country. Everybody knows that. Don’t upset yourself.”

  “‘The students at Lund University oppose it also, in even greater numbers. The resolution from Lund says, “Immigration that leads to foreign elements being absorbed by our people seems to us damaging and indefensible.”’ Foreign elements.”

  “Cecilia, they are just students.”

  “They are the future elite of the country. The idea that ten doctors could damage anything…”

  She left that unfinished and pushed her dishes away irritably, as if they too had voted against admitting the doctors. “I don’t understand how you can be so blase about this.”

  “And I don’t understand why you let yourself be so worried. It’s natural that there would be a certain amount of sympathy with Germany. Our connections go back centuries. But the majority of Swedes will not stand by and watch the Germans make life seriously difficult for their Jews, if it ever comes to that.”

  If it ever came to that. It had already come to that. And it was not only the privileged Swedish students who didn’t want Jewish immigrants. But yet again, Cecilia couldn’t talk to Lisbeth about it; Lisbeth thought she was hysterical.

  That afternoon, they broke ground for the art gallery, with all the requisite pomp and dignitaries. Lars, the raison d’être, sat in the front row, oblivious even when all the assembled stood to applaud him. For the next few years, Cecilia and Lars and Lisbeth would live between the perfect quiet of the cemetery on one side of the house and the noisy upheaval of construction on the other side, a drawback they had ignored until now. She and Lisbeth were still at odds on all kinds of details, but many of them were years down the road, and they were united, at least, on the design of the gallery. Odd to think how these sorts of decisions had been easier with Lars in a way, although they never planned anything so ambitious as a medium-size gallery. She supposed he had let her do things her way so that he was free to paint.

  After the ground-breaking ceremony, Fredrik and his wife Regina and Natalie and her Paulus were to spend the night in Siljevik. Lisbeth joined them for dinner. Cecilia sometimes wondered how it struck her brother and sister and their spouses that the curator of the Vogt Foundation, a woman who was well-spoken and not shy, was almost always at family occasions when they visited Siljevik. Usually things went well, but sometimes when the talk became too intimate about the family or “the Jewish question,” she could see that they were uncertain about Lisbeth’s presence.

  This time, it was Cecilia who started it. Over the fish, she mentioned that Ragnar Josephson, the director of the National Theatre and a Jew, had given a speech to the congregations in Stockholm and Gothenburg about the hard place in which Swedish Jews found themselves. He put the dilemma in blunt terms: Should we allow a small, select number of German Jews into Sweden on humanitarian grounds, and risk the precarious balance we have been building for a century and a half?

  “What is the precarious balance, exactly?” Fredrik asked, moving a very small amount of the sauce off his cod. He loved caper sauce but had been ordered by his doctor and Regina to lose some weight.

  “Convincing the Swedes that we are more Swedish than Jewish,” Cecilia said rather sharply.

  In the silence that followed, Natalie took Lars’s left hand, and held it. He had been fed the soft things he ate earlier in the kitchen, and now he sat, looking more as if he were in a streetcar with strangers than in his own house with his family. Cecilia could still be saddened at how easily all of them ignored his presence. She pushed on, despite the fact that everyone except Lars and Lisbeth looked a little uneasy.

  “The alternative, according to Josephson, is to support a larger number of German Jews and watch anti-Jewish feeling rise even higher.”

  Fredrik, who had bravado but not courage, agreed that the times were dangerous. With a partly furtive, partly apologetic glance at Lisbeth, he said, “We owe it to the community here to keep the number of immigrants down. That may be regrettable, but perhaps it is the only way to safeguard our fortunate Swedish lives.”

  “Nonsense,” Natalie said.

  Natalie thought she understood Germany because she took the waters every year at Wiesbaden. She believed the Germans were like the Swedes, only more numerous and suffering from wounded pride since the Paris treaty.

  “There is not going to be any need to safeguard our fortunate lives, as you call them,” she said. “Cooler heads will prevail in Germany before any serious harm is done.”

  The damask-covered table glittered with silver and cut glass, but Cecilia’s mind went to homespun weaving, carved wooden spoons and rustic pottery. Until her housekeeper’s revelation about the Siljevik dress, it had
never occurred to her that there could be any disjunction between her Jewishness and the affection she and Lars felt for old Swedish songs and customes. Now, even as she watched their heritage being commandeered by German sympathizers, it still seemed incomprehensible. We worked for decades fanning those small, weak flames back into life, she thought. And now I stand by as they are added to a bonfire that threatens to consume us.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  JULY 1934

  MACDONALD LAWRIE WAS over the moon. His letter in response to Sofie’s was happily chaotic. He wrote, “Never feel you are saying goodbye to Askebo. We will return every summer.” And, “Now you must call me Mac, as my friends do.” And, “The biblical paintings at the Sveden estate are marvellous. But, compared with your note, everything is dust.” He would rush over tomorrow, after escorting the students to a manager’s house with particularly fine murals.

  She told a sullen Marianne not to say anything about the engagement, she was not ready to talk about it yet. Marianne promised, and by the time the family party began, it was clear she had told Birgittta, Sonja and Tilda. Sofie did not have much appetite for more crayfish and aquavit. Probably one crayfish party a year was enough. The family crowded close together at the tables under the birches. The daughters-in-law and sons-in-law were always disconcerted by the way the Olssons squeezed ten people around a table that held six, but it was an old habit. As grandchildren hung across Sofie’s lap, swinging from one uncle to another, or chased each other along the river, and their parents jostled her to get the cheese or the beer, she watched as if from a distance. They were so dear, and there were so many of them. They were so loud, and several of them clever. Of course she would return here in the summers, although she would be happy not to see a crayfish for a long time.

  She went to bed, leaving the last of them still sitting at the point—the sons-in-law and Tilda, who loved a party. She dreamed that a Glasgow jewellery-maker was making her a pendant. It was in the Rennie Mackintosh style, with a few cabochons hung from a spiderweb of chains. There were two problems with it. The first was it was meant for a low-cut gown. She explained to the jeweller, a lovely young woman who looked like one of Mac’s students, that she always wore high collars, but the jeweller answered that it would be impossible with this necklace. The more serious problem was that the jeweller was literally fashioning it on her body, hammering her collarbones and breastbone to get the brass backing into the proper shape and screwing the stones directly into her chest.